Lionsgate Hires Writer-Director for New Adaptation of AMERICAN PSYCHO

Lionsgate has hired Noble Jones to write and direct a new adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis‘ American Psycho. Jones is a protégé of David Fincher having worked as the second unit director on The Social Network. According to Deadline, Jones pitched the project to Lionsgate earlier this year and turned in a script about a month ago. Variety adds that the project has not been greenlit yet, but Deadline says that the new version will have a lower budget than the 2000 adaptation starring Christian Bale. More importantly, the remake will bring yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman into present-day New York whereas writer-director Mary Harron kept the late 1980s setting of Ellis’ novel.

For those unfamiliar with the book and the 2000 movie, hit the jump for the synopsis and the trailer for the Bale version.

Here’s the trailer for 2000’s American Psycho starring Christian Bale.

And here’s the synopsis for Bret Easton Ellis’ novel:

In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.